The untold story of The Beatles album ‘Revolver’
By the mid-1960s, The Beatles were beginning to tire of their own Beatlemania. Throughout the past few years, the millions of screams from adoring fans drowned out their music, leading to them having childish fun onstage, knowing that hardly anyone would actually hear what they were playing. Since they couldn’t exhibit their artistic selves on the stage anymore, the band started to make the studio their new medium of expression. As a result of that change in direction, Revolver was born.
Where Rubber Soul marked The Beatles’ first time seeing the album as an art form rather than a collection of songs, Revolver was the moment they started to utilise every aspect of Abbey Road Studios, working with different loops to create whichever sound they wanted. Throughout the record, the band were looking to break down any semblance of genre they still had, making songs that blended hard rock, baroque pop and Eastern music all under one roof. Naturally, that was a fraught task, and the untold tale from the backroom exposes it as even more manic than you might have expected.
As engineer Geoff Emerick recalls during an interview with Rolling Stone, the band arrived at the studio with little pre-production done, thinking they could get most of it crafted in the studio. Sometimes the initial idea would be paper-thin, as Emerick remembers, “Almost every afternoon, John or Paul or George would come in with a scrap of paper that had a lyric of a chord sequence scribbled on it, and within a day or two we’d have yet another unbelievable track down on tape”.
The first hint of change came with their single ‘Rain’, with John Lennon accidentally stumbling upon the sounds of backward music. Entranced by what he heard, Lennon was committed to having backwards music across the album.
From there, Emerick recalled that the Beatles would want everything run in different ways, remarking in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, “Revolver very rapidly became the album where the Beatles would say ‘OK, that sounds great, now let’s play it backwards or speeded up or slowed down’. They tried everything backwards, just to see what things sounded like”.
Across songs like ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, guitarist George Harrison threw on backwards guitar, which involved hours of playing the guitar part forward to sound correct when played backwards. Emerick would also recall how focused Harrison was trying to get exactly the right sound out of his guitar, remembering sessions where he would be completely focused on trying to make his guitar speak in reverse. Although Harrison may have suffered for his art, only a few seconds of the backwards effect was used on the track.
Amid the experimentation, both Lennon and McCartney were growing into proper songwriters along the way. With every unfinished song brought into the studio, the songwriting team saw their collaborative effort as a bit of friendly competition, always trying to outdo what the other was capable of. As the album plays out, the groundwork is being planted for different projects, like the tired sound of ‘Sleeping’ previewing Lennon’s exhaustion with Beatlemania on Plastic Ono Band and Paul McCartney’s lighthearted ballads paving the way for future masterpieces like ‘Live and Let Die’ and ‘My Love’.
This was also the album where Lennon started to become partial to the concept of artificial double tracking, which became a hallmark of his vocal style. Since Lennon was never the biggest fan of his own voice, the flanging effect that he got from the mics at Abbey Road made his voice sound otherworldly, which he used to great effect on songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
Though Revolver was also seen as one of the group’s first fully psychedelic efforts, none of The Beatles partook in any narcotics during the sessions, instead, they were gripped by a gruelling workload, with Emerick saying, “My strongest memory of those sessions was how utterly draining they were”. As the band experimented with different styles, they also found new ways to record some of their lighthearted moments as well.
In many ways, it was actually this defiance to overcome the sapping nature of entering the studio largely unplanned that fuelled the album itself. As Emerick remarks, this sense of striving for fun despite the evident pressures was far more apparent than any rivalry that has subsequently been reported. During the playful song ‘Yellow Submarine’, the scene seemed to be ripped out of a Marx Brothers movie, with the band playing with a whole host of guests to give the song the right amount of zany energy it needed.
For all of the great songs on the final product, everything pales in comparison to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Being a group effort from all four members, one of the song’s trademarks comes from Paul McCartney’s assorted tape loops. Taking bits and pieces of noise and putting an avant-garde flair on rock ‘n’ roll, McCartney created a world out of backward guitar and used a sped-up version of him laughing to create the sounds of seagulls on the final track,
Even after the album was completed, producer George Martin thought that the tune was too complex to be recreated in the same way again. Little did he know of the further sonic oddities that The Beatles would throw his way on the next few records, from the controlled chaos of ‘I Am The Walrus’ to combining different songs into one continuous loop on the final side of Abbey Road.
More than anything, Revolver the point where The Beatles became the group that they were going to become later down the line. As Martin noted the vast experimentation on the project, every major songwriter was presenting something new to the table, from McCartney finding his place writing ballads to Lennon finally being unafraid to put his own thoughts and feelings into his music. Right behind them was Harrison, always approaching songs with grit and determination while introducing the sounds of Eastern music to the Western music scene.
Although Revolver marked the first time that certain Beatles songs couldn’t be reproduced live, none of that seemed to matter to the band, who quit their touring life a few months after the album hit stores. While The Beatles’ brand had become too big to populate the world’s stadiums anymore, their creative streak was reaching an all-time high, and they weren’t even thinking about slowing down. The tale of Revolver from those who were there shows that as they sped towards the future, they did so with a sense of determination to have fun. In many ways, that spawned the boundary-pushing ways of the record far more than any avant-garde intent. In the studio, they were still just four young lads from Liverpool.
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